Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europe (review)

The hermaphrodite is a complex and fraught figure in Renaissance Europe, appearing in discourses ranging from law to philosophy, astrology to satire, medicine to love poetry. Accordingly, Kathleen P. Long's approach here is emphatically, and rewardingly, interdisciplinary; she combines a wealth of historical information and textual analysis with a judicious sprinkling of modern theory, all set against a historical backdrop both political and scientific. Attentive to the early-modern scientific tendency to understand truth as 'what was commonly accepted' (p. 22), Long compares different Renaissance discourses on the hermaphrodite, revealing quite how fraught and contradictory this 'truth' could be. For some Renaissance thinkers, such as the Swiss anatomist Caspar Bauhin, this proliferation of often conflicting discourses is unsettling, potentially destabilising our understanding of the body. Yet while the period's more 'modern', experience-based paradigm of scientific objectivity attempted to resolve such uncertainties by holding the body as the ultimate ground of truth, even this empirical body could prove unstable or unwilling to give up its secrets for other writers, such as Jacques Duval. Alongside the history of science, Long is also attentive to the cultural and political forces that provoked such fascination for the hermaphrodite. As she persuasively argues, sixteenth-century France's particular fascination with hermaphrodites stems in no small part from the intense political and religious upheaval of the Reformation. Yet the hermaphrodite is not a stable figure, either in itself or in its symbolism; in its embodiment of disorder, the hermaphrodite can become a striking metaphor for 'a country torn by differences' while also 'potentially unifying those differences' (p. 2). To some extent, the meaning of the hermaphrodite depends on its generic or discursive context; while satirical works mobilize it to reassert the need for clear-cut division, mystical and lyric works propose it as a figure for transcending such divisions (p. 3).

One of the strengths of Long's approach is her reluctance to explore the hermaphrodite simply according to modern paradigms. While we might nowadays understand the hermaphrodite primarily in terms of sex or gender, it is frequently associated in the Renaissance mind with other issues: astrology, childbirth, alchemy and monsters — and even, in more metaphorical senses, cannibalism, incest and other breakdowns of the boundaries between self and other. Long thus resituates the Renaissance hermaphrodite into contexts, discourses and traditions that have long since been abandoned; this can prove somewhat unsettling, particularly when Long strives valiantly to make the modern reader appreciate the importance and intricacies of alchemy. Yet given the rigour of this historically informed focus, Long appears surprisingly lax when, in later chapters, she tacitly mobilizes other forms of gender subversion — sex change, transvestism, bisexuality — under the general heading of 'hermaphroditism'. Some more attention to the distinctions between these different forms of gender confusion would have been helpful here to bring out what, if anything, is specific to the hermaphrodite; perhaps, though, if the hermaphrodite can indeed symbolize the loss of boundaries, any such attempt at definition would betray the spirit of Long's wide-ranging and engaging study.